People plan: ensuring wellbeing and inclusion

The latest NHS People Plan highlights the need for the NHS to look after its staff and ensure retention by being ‘positive, compassionate and inclusive’. However, the Government has faced criticism for the lack of an equivalent plan for social care and going into the pandemic with a major workforce gap. Clinical Services Journal provides an overview of the key ambitions.

Following the lessons learned from the global pandemic and the intense pressures experienced by healthcare workers on the frontline, there has been an increased focus on the need to: ‘care for the carers’, grow the current workforce, tackle inequalities and develop new ways of working and delivering care. The arrival of COVID-19 acted as a springboard, bringing about an incredible scale and pace of transformation, and highlighting the enormous contribution of all those working in the NHS. The aim of the new People Plan is to build on this momentum and foster a “culture of inclusion and belonging”. 

We are the NHS: People Plan 2020/21 – action for us all, along with Our People Promise, set out what NHS staff can expect from their leaders and from each other. These documents build on the interim NHS People Plan, published in June 2019, and set out practical actions for employers and systems, as well as the actions that NHS England and NHS Improvement and Health Education England will take, over the remainder of 2020/21.